Internic used to send you a paper invoice a few months after registering a .net, you then had to tear it off and send a us$70 check to them - and this applied i

Internic used to send you a paper invoice a few months after registering a .net, you then had to tear it off and send a us$70 check to them - and this applied if you were in the UK too, that all changed with joker.com iirc. Nominet system was just poorly engineered, slow (occasionally took hours) and damn right nasty to use in an end to end automated fashion - parsing emails for clues of errors etc.. The Oracle upgrade was just OTT for a system managing maybe 5m domains at the time (not an NS provider, although maybe they managed a root), the early 2000 version of big data, big money and loads of golf (Im guessing on the golf).